Gerald's Game

GERALD’S GAME (Mike Flanagan, 2017)

With declining intimacy in their marriage in GERALD’S GAME, Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) go to an isolated lake house to spice up their relationship. She agrees to entertain his sexual wishes and consents to being handcuffed to the bed, but Jessie draws the line when he wants to play out a rape fantasy. Whether brought on by anger or something else, Gerald has a heart attack, collapses, and falls onto the floor when Jessie pushes him off of her. While her husband’s lack of movement and blood pooling around him is highly worrying, Jessie has a more pressing concern. She is shackled to the bed, cannot get free, and has no one nearby to hear her cries for help.

This desperate situation becomes more fraught when a hungry stray dog wanders into the bedroom. Seeking an escape of any kind, Jessie flees into her mind where she strategizes with herself, is taunted by her husband, remembers a painful child incident with her father (Henry Thomas), and avoids looking in the corner where she saw the death-like Moonlight Man (Carel Struycken).

The filmography of GERALD’S GAME director and co-writer Mike Flanagan reveals an aptitude for spinning psychological horror out of action largely confined to a house. Whether focusing on the brother and sister trying to capture evidence of an evil mirror in OCULUS or a deaf writer in the woods attempting to fend off a masked killer outside her home in HUSH, Flanagan demonstrates a knack for using location limitations to wring out the tension. The houses in these films don’t need to be inherently scary if they harbor an unhappy family history, expose vulnerabilities, or isolate, as in GERALD’S GAME. Although a dog licking its chops and the embodiment of death appear, the mind’s assessment of danger, coupled with its difficulty to produce a solution, generate the terror.

GERALD’S GAME shows that as a mental protection strategy, compartmentalization can be useful. Jessie bottles up her anxiety as best she can because it will help her survive. She summons strength by breaking things down into manageable bits and blocking out the rest as much as possible. Gugino’s performance relies on conveying an active mind scanning Jessie’s options for a solution. The character is bound and vulnerable, but Gugino displays the toughness and ingenuity that identify how constraints don’t have to make one weak.

The primary horror in this Stephen King adaptation is psychological. Flanagan expertly sets up the situation with a highly tense sequence that draws immediate identification with Jessie. While GERALD’S GAME pokes at mental discomfort, the director allows for one excellent gross-out moment that ought to provoke plenty of seat-squirming even if this film is only available to see on the smaller screens at home. In the film’s end Flanagan unnecessarily literalizes points, yet it’s hard to be too critical for the nice notes he plays regarding overcoming trauma.

Grade: B

Barton Fink

BARTON FINK (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1991)

New York playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) is fresh off a stage success in 1941 when Hollywood comes calling. Barton fancies himself as working toward a new theater for the common man, but he is reluctantly drawn to accept an opportunity that can help to finance much more of what he really wants to do. In BARTON FINK studio executive Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner) couldn’t be more enthusiastic about hiring this writer in to bring his special touch to the pictures, but Barton soon learns he’s not going to be working on anything highbrow. Jack assigns him to pen a wrestling B-movie starring Wallace Beery and wants a screenplay by week’s end.

For his time in Los Angeles Barton strives to abide by his principles, choosing to take residence in the ramshackle Hotel Earle than the swankier places where the studio could put him up. Driven to distraction by the noise from the neighboring room, Barton complains to the front desk, resulting in Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), the traveling insurance salesman next door, to come by to apologize. Charlie is a friendly guy, and he makes it a habit to drop by Barton’s room when he fears him enter. Although Barton wants to work, he has a hard time rejecting Charlie’s company. Anyway, he’s in state of paralysis in which he can’t get past describing the film’s first scene.

BARTON FINK unspools like the spiritual predecessor to last year’s Coen brothers’ film HAIL, CAESAR! Although they take place ten years apart, both are set at the fictional Capital Studios and initiate existential crises in their main characters. Barton’s most obvious conflict is an ill-timed case of writer’s block, but what brings it on is harder to pin down. Is he simply out of his element in a different medium? Can he not write because he thinks the work is beneath me, or is he not as in touch with the common man he reveres? The film is too slippery to identify as being about one particular thing. Stylistically it’s a supremely weird combination of satire, horror, film noir, and religious allegory. Still, at its core is the despair of not being able to escape the one’s own mind.

The aphorism of indeterminate origin “no matter where you go, there you are” succinctly describes Barton’s predicament. BARTON FINK puts forward that the writer might occupy a literal fiery furnace, one that makes the wallpaper glue drip and the decorative surfaces peel. It seems significant that the film begins and ends with shots of the wallpaper, the sort of thing one can’t look away from or would stare at while trying to pump ideas out of a dry mental well. Yet it’s just as plausible that the heat Barton feels is stoked by his own feelings of impostor-like inadequacy.

For all of the esteem Barton expresses for the common man, he doesn’t listen to the one in his midst. Charlie, a fellow as affable as they get, struggles to get a word in edgewise, and when he does, Barton doesn’t listen. A solution to his problem is right in front of him, but Barton is so preoccupied with what’s rattling around his skull that he can’t spot it. That grand cosmic joke stretches across Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. The suffering person’s inability to save themselves is a grand cosmic joke that stretches across Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. It’s darker in BARTON FINK, in part because the writer embraces that pain as if it is inherently holy.

Grade: B+

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) (Noah Baumbach, 2017)

To friends, acquaintances, and strangers, the life of sculptor and retired professor Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) looks like a success, but the man himself nurtures jealousy of his peers’ wider acclaim and animosity toward an art world that has failed to appreciate him sufficiently. He sold a work to the Whitney decades ago, yet it’s indicative of his status that no one is exactly sure where it is being stored. In THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED), Harold’s self-centeredness has contributed to the strained relationship he has with the three children his four marriages have produced.

Danny (Adam Sandler) and Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), the two oldest, share a mother and the sense that they were never especially important to their father. Such treatment fuels Danny to be a doting dad with his daughter Eliza (Grace Van Patten). While Matthew (Ben Stiller) is perceived, not incorrectly, to be the favored child, he carries his share of grudges regarding Harold. Despite their frustrations, all three still seek approval from him. Danny and Jean strive to secure a retrospective show of Harold’s work. Although Danny objects, Matthew tries to arrange the sale of the big, costly New York City house where Harold and his current wife Maureen (Emma Thompson) reside.

The episodic nature and title of THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) suggest that the glimpses of this dysfunctional family don’t tell everything but encapsulate the fundamental truths about them and viewpoints within this unit. Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s film depicts a period of critical transition. Danny has separated from his wife and needs direction. Eliza is starting college. Matthew is at a crossroads in his marriage and career. Harold is trying to adjust to retirement. Although the chapter-like structure leaves gaps, it contains the greatest hits and misses in Meyerowitz family history. Life brings new developments, but these events all tend to circle back to be understood through the lens of old resentments. The stories each person tells himself and herself have as much to do with constructing their identities as what actually happens.

Baumbach’s comedies about families often have a strong undercurrent of anger. MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, and WHILE WE’RE YOUNG, among others, laugh at the ways people can get maligned and twisted in their most central relationships, but the humor provides a thin cover for bitterness. The characters in THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES exist in the state of a soft boil. Their emotions are adequately hot without making them hard. Baumbach crafts a warm, humane movie accepting of people in spite of their faults. The Meyerowitzes aren’t going to resolve all of their differences in the course of the film or beyond it, but Baumbach shows why blood ties and shared history can be worth saving in spite of the aggravations.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES cast is superb at conveying the commonly understood order and unspoken, or whispered, opinions in families. Baumbach excels at capturing the dynamic in which each person assumes the role they’ve adopted through the years whether or not they’ve changed outside the family. He’s also really sharp and funny in observing how parents and siblings don’t fully understand what the adult kids do in their jobs and how watching TV together can be as meaningful as anything in maintaining the peace.

Sandler has proven to be a good actor when working with directors who can modulate his tendencies. Here he’s quite affecting playing a loving father who transforms into an ignored little boy desperate for validation when around his dad. His tender scenes with Van Patten reveal Danny at his best. His goodness is visible in how he’s attentive in a way that Harold wasn’t and isn’t and also in how she protects him when she knows he’s vulnerable. The ease and honesty they have with one another contrasts powerfully with how Harold and Danny communicate. Hoffman is funny and tragic as a wrecking ball of a patriarch, one whose narrow vision fails to acknowledge that in chasing acceptance from the world at large he’s missed the love those closest to him are so eager to give. A life has many potential narratives, but it’s the one we select, rather than what is written for us, that determines if we are satisfied.

Grade: A

Blade Runner 2049

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)

In BLADE RUNNER 2049 thirty years have passed since the events of the previous film, yet little seems to have changed for the better for those humans who haven’t moved off-world. Nexus-9 replicants are more obedient than the previous model of bioengineered humans. The Nexus-8s hiding out still face termination at the hands of police officers called blade runners. When K (Ryan Gosling) examines the property of his latest target, he finds a case whose contents could threaten to upset the balance of civilization.

The box holds the remains of a replicant who died in childbirth, and other evidence suggests that the child survived. As replicants were believed to be incapable of reproducing, K’s superior officer, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), orders him to find and kill the child. K’s investigation leads him to the Wallace Corporation, which has taken over where the Tyrell Corporation’s efforts ended. Founder Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) wants to increase production of his replicants and thus greatly desires to have his assistant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) find this wonder. K’s search will ultimately lead him to Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who holds the information everyone seeks.

Like its predecessor, BLADE RUNNER 2049 is an astounding visual achievement, with director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins contrasting the bleak, neon cityscapes with foggy, tinted areas outside dense populations centers. It all feels very unnatural, alien even, despite mostly taking place in southern California. Although there is a sense of too few resources for too many people in this dystopia, the framing highlights the disconnection. Characters are practically swallowed up by all of the space around them. They often live alone--K’s apartment is more like a cozy cell--and have seemingly no social circle. Work brings them into contact with others, but it encourages impersonal interactions and extends the sense of acting in isolation.

The most meaningful relationship in BLADE RUNNER 2049 is with technology. K has a virtual girlfriend named Joi (Ana de Armas). While interacting with this artificially intelligent hologram provides the kind of connection he wants, it is merely an illusion tailored to his preferences. Like Saul of Tarsus, K has a transformative experience, one that turns him from a persecutor of replicants to their defender. Awareness of a miraculous birth changes how he sees himself and others, rewriting what he has taken for granted. Villeneuve also uses the first few notes of a theme from Prokofiev’s PETER AND THE WOLF as a clue that challenges to the system can come from unlikely places.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 is about as close to slow cinema as expensive Hollywood productions are likely to get, and it is pleasurable to luxuriate in its lulling sonic atmosphere and visual distinctiveness. The screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Green is overstuffed with ideas that it is incapable of doing justice to them all. Style may overwhelm the substance, but what style it is.

Grade: B+

The LEGO Ninjago Movie

THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE (Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, and Bob Logan, 2017)

Although estranged from his father, the fearsome Garmadon (Justin Theroux), teenager Lloyd (Dave Franco) still gets blamed for the terror his dad inflicts on the city of Ninjago. As leader of the Secret Ninja Force, Lloyd and five of his friends fight Garmadon in THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE. After many failed attempts, Garmadon finally defeats the Secret Ninja Force, leading Lloyd to deploy The Ultimate Weapon. What he unleashes causes even more chaos in the city, so Lloyd and his team must combine forces with Garmadon to go on a journey to find The Ultimate Ultimate Weapon and save Ninjago.

Like the two other LEGO films, THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE bursts with visual ingenuity and comedic irreverence. It moves briskly through an archetypal story that is vigorously seasoned with one-liners. The shots are crammed with details and jokes waiting to be discovered when stepping through the frames on a Blu-ray or digital file. There’s plenty to be impressed by, yet the sameness of this with the other films, in what I suppose is becoming the LEGO genre, render it as a solid effort lacking novelty.

THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE is neither the inventive surprise that characterized THE LEGO MOVIE nor the exhaustively ambitious effort that marked THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE. The style is well established, and even if the source property, a toy line and TV show, is less familiar to the masses, the premise borrows heavily from the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell identified as common to many myths. These aren’t necessarily negative factors. In fact the predictability may enhance its appeal as comfort viewing, especially for kids and parents eager to distract them. Newness in and of itself doesn’t makes something better, but the prefabricated quirkiness of THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE dazzles less because it plays as though it’s been assembled from a tried-and-true set of instructions.

Freshness criticisms aside, it’s a consistently funny movie, which it achieves in part through the volume of jokes. THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE’s subtext about children coming to understand that fathers and mothers were and are people with lives extending beyond parenthood may be more subtle and complex for younger viewers to grasp, but it’s nice to find some thematic intricacy among the stylistic uniformity.

Grade: B-

Battle of the Sexes

BATTLE OF THE SEXES (Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, 2017)

Having founded the first women’s professional tennis tour in reaction to being paid much less than the men, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) was well acquainted with being undervalued because of her gender. In BATTLE OF THE SEXES she gets to defend women’s excellence on the court when retired tennis star Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) challenges her to a highly publicized 1973 match. Bobby is a loudmouth who belittles women as being inferior in tennis and daily life. While it takes some time for Billie Jean to accept her part in the TV sideshow, she welcomes the chance to prove what she and other women are capable of.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES places a lot of emphasis on the lead-up to the the consequential match between one of the best women’s players in the world at the time and a 55-year-old former champion. Billie Jean is dealing with personal and professional stresses that threaten to distract her from what she most wants to accomplish. Helping to run the tour steals some time and focus from training. Falling into a relationship with hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) leads her to revelations about herself that she’d either ignored or denied as a married woman. On the other hand, Bobby relishes the carnival he constructs around the big showdown. He’s back to being the center of attention, even if he is acting like a piggish buffoon. For a man who seems to have lost his purpose in life and is afflicted with a gambling addiction, the Battle of the Sexes could help to fill both of those holes.

Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton do excellent work with the meticulous recreation of the period and using the camera to illustrate the division. The placement of men and women within a room and often in separate shots highlight the frustration Billie Jean and her tourmates feel at being restricted by the men in power and cut off from what they deserve. Stone locates the right mix of drive, intensity, and vulnerability in Billie Jean to show a person who enjoys being in the spotlight but feels the pressure that comes with it in public and private life. Billie Jean’s story is served best in BATTLE OF THE SEXES, as the film empathizes more with her predicament, yet it doesn’t come at the expense of Bobby. His motivations and beliefs are not as clear as they might appear, and his demons make him seem sadder than the foolish role he gladly plays for the cameras.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES entertains even as Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay wobbles in spots and raises questions about if this is the best form for this story. This exhibition match provided the basis for an ABC TV movie starring Holly Hunter in 2001. A documentary would have been better suited for contextualizing the Battle of the Sexes. Regardless, the strength of the drama and the look make this tennis showdown worth revisiting again.

Grade: B-

Ingrid Goes West

INGRID GOES WEST (Matt Spicer, 2017)

INGRID GOES WEST begins with a distraught Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza) crying as she scrolls through the bubbly Instagram posts her friend Charlotte (Meredith Hagner) makes from her wedding. Ingrid wasn’t invited, so she crashes the reception and maces Charlotte before being dragged off. Although it appears that this was a friendship that soured, in reality they barely know one another. Charlotte just happened to comment on one of Ingrid’s posts, leading the obsessive social media user to stalk her as though they were besties.

After a period of institutionalization, Ingrid returns home as isolated and lonely as ever now that her mother has died. Without any supervision, she reverts to bad behaviors and seeks a new person to fixate on. Ingrid zeroes in on photographer Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). When she receives a tidbit of validation from her new target, Ingrid decides to use the money she inherited to move to California and hunt down her new best friend.

Make no mistake, Ingrid definitely has unresolved mental health issues, but the running joke in this dark comedy is that Taylor’s narcissism allows the distorted but symbiotic relationship to flourish. The “friendship” is mutually beneficial because it’s one-sided on both sides. Ingrid affirms everything Taylor says and does. She’s a mirror rather than a friend, but being like this gets Ingrid close to Taylor, which is all she wants. Taylor gets her ego stroked by someone who’s like the physical manifestation of her fawning Instagram mentions. Each person in the relationship matters only in the sense of what they reflect.

INGRID GOES WEST is savvy to the nuances of social media and smartphone usage. Not muting her phone’s keyboard provides an early indication of Ingrid’s pathology. Ingrid’s responses to posts are intended to seem casual but are in fact the result of several drafts that have her sweating over the least threatening way to indicate laughter without coming across as needy or deranged. Although writer-director Matt Spicer and co-writer David Branson Smith savagely dissect social media usage, they aren’t alarmists. When people are feeling more disconnected and superfluous, they identify the fundamental appeal of platforms that allow us to transmit idealized versions of ourselves and feel as though we are loved. How social media can be used isn’t a disease but a symptom.

If INGRID GOES WEST expresses contempt for anything, it is the predatory element that can drive the conversation. Taylor catches Ingrid’s eye because a magazine article pegs her as the new girl crush for readers. She’s not presented as someone who is interesting for whatever merits she has but as a trophy of sorts or this year’s product model to acquire. Conversely, Taylor’s persona is constructed on falsehoods that lay traps. Although purportedly a photographer, her real job is as an influencer. She’s paid to promote goods and services as though she’s sharing her tastes.

INGRID GOES WEST’s cast brings a pointed sense of humor to a world in which getting to know someone only goes as deep as creeping on their social media posts and lists of likes. Plaza tends to specialize in characters who are funny because they are so prickly. Part of the fun of her as Ingrid comes in how she disguises that aloofness and when she lets it show. For all of Ingrid’s purposeful and questionable actions, Plaza shows how this young woman is ultimately very naïve because most of her personal interactions are mediated through technology. O’Shea Jackson Jr. lends sweetness to the film as Ingrid’s incessantly vaping, BATMAN-obsessed landlord and sort-of boyfriend. Olsen is very funny exaggerating Taylor’s vapidity. The humor and horror of INGRID GOES WEST comes not from being a cautionary tale but the observation that, to a large extent, this is how we live now.

Grade: A-

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT (Ridley Scott, 1982 and 2007)

Four artificial yet human-like drone workers known as replicants escape from laboring on a planet colony to running from the law in 2019 Los Angeles. The replicants, led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), are marked for death--or retirement, as it’s called in director Ridley Scott’s science fiction film BLADE RUNNER. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a weary policeman in the Blade Runner unit who is tasked with hunting down and executing these runaways. Although he harbors no sympathy for the creations of the Tyrell Corporation, his view of them becomes complicated when he meets Rachel (Sean Young), the latest replicant iteration and one that can pass even more convincingly as a real person.

BLADE RUNNER transports the world of mid-20th century film noir several decades ahead. With blazing neon signs and massive advertisements cluttering the polluted, rain-battered skyline, Scott’s vision, which itself owes a debt to METROPOLIS, has essentially defined how the future is expected to look on film. THE MATRIX and GHOST IN THE SHELL are just two examples of many that derive their looks from this seminal work. Thirty-five years later the images in BLADE RUNNER still dazzle with visual imagination in addition to being fundamental to establishing the oppressive atmosphere that permeates the story. The detective, his targets, and most of the individuals with whom they come into contact feel choked by the dystopian lives into which they’ve been delivered. Their environment reflects the restrictions occupying their minds.

Vangelis’ synth-laden score is evocative of a foreseen time in which the distinction between man and man-made begin to blur. Electronic melodies emerge from machine-like clanging and burbling, the human or human-like straining to rise above the mechanistic. BLADE RUNNER’s score also expresses the weight of the atmosphere, bringing to bear the darkness, fullness, and brittleness of the strange advances that have become commonplace.

In their loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples raise questions as relevant as ever regarding technology and how it affects our philosophies, our economies, our interactions, and the environment. BLADE RUNNER is more of a canvas for sketching out ideas for further consideration than a deeply argued text, yet it seems strikingly prescient in anticipating how modern life is becoming more inhuman.

Five versions of BLADE RUNNER have been available on home video: the U.S. theatrical cut, the international theatrical cut, the 1992 so-called director’s cut, the workprint, and 2007’s THE FINAL CUT. Despite being called the director’s cut, Scott was not as involved with that version, making THE FINAL CUT the best realization of his vision for the film. The obsessive may want to track down the other cuts or read up on the differences, but this version should serve most well.

Grade: A

It

IT (Andy Muschietti, 2017)

In October 1988 Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott) goes out in the rain to play with the paper boat his older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) makes for him, but he never comes back, having been attacked by the sewer-dwelling Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård). In IT Georgie’s tragic disappearance is curiously unexceptional. In Derry, Maine missing kids are like a seasonal crop. The next summer Bill remains persistent in his search for Georgie. The hunt he leads will bring him and his bullied friends, including jokester Richie (Finn Wolfhard) and Beverly (Sophia Lillis), the lone girl among this circle of self-identified losers, closer to whatever evil emerges every twenty-seven years.

Screenwriters Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman don’t attempt to adapt all 1100+ pages of Stephen King’s source novel for this version of IT, yet the film still feels like it’s racing to cram in as much plot as possible in 135 minutes. It’s breathlessly paced, which is a positive quality in a monstrously sized page-turner and a detriment when trying to build suspense and instill horror in a movie. Films create more tension through the anticipation of something will jumping out of the shadows. Alfred Hitchcock explained that suspense comes from letting the audience know something will happen and stretching out the moments until that event, such as knowing when a time bomb will go off. Having that bomb explode unexpectedly in a scene is merely surprise, providing a jolt for a few seconds rather than the suspense of several minutes. Instead of massaging scenes for the inherent terror in skulking around dark places, IT exhibits a tendency to cut right to that fleeting payoff when the evil thing reveals itself.

While IT feels unsatisfactory as a scary movie, it is more perceptive regarding the nature of fear. What frightens people is individualized, making the evil in Derry so horrific because it looks different according to the observer. Whether one is unnerved by clowns or not, Skarsgård’s friendly manner laced with menace and Pennywise’s extra-long, front teeth, suggesting a predatory, animal-like quality, makes this particular manifestation of a sinister, supernatural entity so disturbing. The double bind of a welcoming figure who exudes a sense of malevolence stirs up unease that can be easier to intuit than explain. The way Skarsgård overenunciates his t’s, like a sledgehammer smiting a spike, puts one on edge.

IT director Andy Muschietti excels at capturing how kids act with one another and coaxes terrific performances from his young cast. Depictions of teenage life on film often veer toward idealized reminiscences or sensational portraits of trauma. IT recognizes that the casual cruelty and extraordinary kindness teenagers are capable of are points on a spectrum, and the simplicity of moving along that line is what can make this particular stage intimidating and exciting. The group of kids is clever but not in a precocious way. Their wisdom is still limited by their ages. Unlike the caricature of a character he was saddled with in THE BOOK OF HENRY, Lieberher portrays Bill with the vulnerability and fortitude believable for a teen wrestling with tragedy. Lillis impresses in playing Beverly as someone whose experiences have made her wise beyond her years and aware of her power. As horror, IT can be lacking, but as teen drama it can be quite effective.

Grade: B-

Medicine for Melancholy

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY (Barry Jenkins, 2008)

Two strangers wake up after a drunken one-night stand at a mutual friend’s party and awkwardly interact in the harsh light of morning in MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo’ (Tracey Weggins) get coffee and share a cab ride, but he seems much more interested in building upon what happened the night before than she does. If it weren’t for her forgetting her wallet in the taxi, they’d likely never see each other again.

Micah tracks her down with a little difficulty. Jo’ doesn’t seem too keen to invite him into her spacious San Francisco apartment because, as she grudgingly reveals, she’s living there with her boyfriend, a curator who is currently in London. Nevertheless, Micah possesses a certain charm he deploys to persuade her to spend the day exploring the city with him. Although Jo’ sends him mixed signals, he’s happy to have the time together.

Writer-director Barry Jenkins’ first feature film finds him testing out themes and soaking up the atmosphere in ways he refined eight years later with MOONLIGHT. MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY unspools as the inverse of BEFORE SUNRISE. The pair’s brief, shared time, roughly twenty-four hours, begins intimately and then works toward lively conversations about their views on all manner of topics. The film is also clearly indebted to Wong Kar-wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and Claire Denis’ FRIDAY NIGHT, from which Jenkins borrows a song for the soundtrack. MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY wallows in the romantic tension fueled by desire and loneliness fighting with personal circumstances that make such a relationship illicit.

Jo’ already being with someone hangs over her day with Micah, as does the fact that she’s dating a white man. Cenac plays Micah as a funny, down-to-earth guy, but his character doesn’t hide his resentments. He bristles at his position as a black man in a gentrifying San Francisco that would outprice him and those like him from the city and the shoebox of a studio apartment he rents. Meanwhile, Jo’ doesn’t have to worry about paying for the big place where she lives. Micah doesn’t accuse her of betraying her race, but the privilege he perceives her benefiting from is implicit in the frustration he expresses, particularly when he has a few drinks in him.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY succeeds more at getting into Micah’s head than Jo’s. Jenkins lets the characters’ actions speak for themselves. While Micah’s motives are straightforward, the psychology behind Jo’s decisions are obscured more. She’s wary of revealing much about herself to Micah and displays an awareness that she shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing. Still, she submits to this encounter and takes an active role in ensuring that hanging out isn’t innocent socializing. Jenkins doesn’t need to explain all of Jo’s choices, but he could have done better at balancing our understanding of the two protagonists.

Cinematographer James Laxton’s work on MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY stands in sharp contrast to the visual style of his lighting for MOONLIGHT. Where the latter boasted sumptuous colors, MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY is often bleached so that it almost appears to be in black and white. Like cautionary and prohibitory signals, faded yellows and reds peek out most prominently from the delicate, silvery images. In part Jenkins’ film is about how you interpret your surroundings. Although MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY exhibits potential checked by limitations of a young filmmaker, the visual cues Jenkins employs suggest he understands how to have images and words serve one another to achieve something greater than either on their own.

Grade: B-

The Glass Castle

THE GLASS CASTLE (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2017)

The Walls family doesn’t have much in THE GLASS CASTLE, but as far as father Rex (Woody Harrelson) and mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) are concerned, that’s all part of the adventure in their nomadic way of life. Rex is an alcoholic who can’t hold a job for long and is often rushing his family out of town to avoid the police or those seeking overdue payment. Rose Mary spends her days painting and enabling Rex’s destructive behavior. The family moves constantly, relocating all over the western U.S. before the reluctant return to Rex’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia. The shabby home where they place roots is no glass castle, the long-promised and aspirational home Rex talks of building, but at least it provides some stability.

THE GLASS CASTLE is based on the memoir by Jeannette Walls, Rex and Rose Mary’s second oldest child, and the film is told from her perspective. Played at different ages by Chandler Head, Ella Anderson, and Brie Larson, Jeannette admires and tries to help her father while regularly being disappointed by him. She eventually saves enough money to flee West Virginia, get a college degree, and become a professional success as a writer in New York City, yet her parents are the shadow she can’t shake. She lies about her family in social situations, and it’s not hard to see why. When Rex and Rose Mary move to the Big Apple, she does not avoid them, but she is ashamed that they are squatters who sift through the trash to survive.

Co-writer and director Destin Daniel Cretton studied those coping with trauma in his previous film, SHORT TERM 12. THE GLASS CASTLE also explores the cycle of abuse, although this time he focuses on the dysfunction within a single family. To the average person, the squalor and extreme poverty the Walls family lives in is horrifying, yet Cretton emphasizes how normal these conditions seem to those who don’t know anything different and have just accepted it. Rex and Rose Mary romanticize their dire situation, a strategy which comes off like self-protection and a manifestation of mental illness. They don’t beat their children, but the neglect and psychological damage they inflict is no less harmful. It is sad but altogether unsurprising to discover that the unhealthy dynamic Rex and Rose Mary raise their kids in looks better when compared to the upbringing he had.

Although viewers will surely leave the film unlikely to feel charitable toward the parents, THE GLASS CASTLE isn’t interested in judging Rex and Rose Mary. In it and SHORT TERM 12 Cretton seeks for the victim to move on from steeping in deserved resentment, as hard as that may be. Jeannette loves her mom and dad and despairs at the wreckage they’ve made of their lives and and its effect on her. Seen through her eyes, the film demonstrates enormous amounts of empathy and forgiveness while not discounting all the complicated and conflicted feelings churning inside the Walls children. THE GLASS CASTLE wrestles with how to integrate the positive qualities and memories with all of the pain those same people brought on.

When Jeannette is a child, Rex tells her about the point that’s hard to distinguish where a flame ends but heat is visible in a clear, wavering form. He explains that this place is between turbulence and order, where rules don’t apply. Rex and Rose Mary choose to occupy this space but fail to recognize that this zone distorts what is seen in it. They are not beholden to anyone, but their situation is stifling more than it is freeing. THE GLASS CASTLE carries you through a range of emotions with this family. Harrelson in particular is adept at showing how an important family member can attract and repel loved ones to the point of confusion. THE GLASS CASTLE permits the knotty family relationships to stand as complex, unresolved interactions, which is why showing the real people in the end credits seems like a mistake. Perhaps Jeannette and her siblings have worked through all their grievances, but the way the subjects of the dramatized story are presented, it comes across like an apology of sorts or a hastily applied but ineffective bandage. The film embraced the contradictions and opposing feelings, so it feels like being undermined somewhat with the conventional happy ending suggested when the real Walls family appears.

Grade: B

Logan Lucky

LOGAN LUCKY (Steven Soderbergh, 2017)

LOGAN LUCKY is an oxymoron of a title that describes a West Virginia family for whom things seem to go south every time it looks like they’ve caught a break. Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) was on the path to a professional football career until an injury ended that possibility. Clyde Logan (Adam Driver) served in Iraq without incident, only to lose his left hand and part of the forearm in an explosion as he was on his way out of the country at the end of his tour. Their sister Mellie (Riley Keough) doesn’t put as much stock in the so-called curse, but Clyde more than makes up for her skepticism as he recounts family history that provides evidence for its reality.

When Jimmy loses a construction job at the Charlotte Motor Speedway through no fault of his own, he decides to apply the knowledge he gained there to improve his lot by illegal means. Jimmy concocts a scheme to steal the money the racetrack brings in from concession sales and convinces his brother and sister to assist. They know an explosives expert with the perfect skillset, except the right man for the job, the appropriately named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), is in prison. Jimmy has an elaborate plan in mind for breaking him out and getting him back behind bars without notice, but he needs to add Joe’s dimwit brothers Fish (Jack Quaid) and Sam (Brian Gleeson) to the crew to get Joe on board. As thoroughly as Jimmy has prepared, everything becomes riskier when they need to execute the heist earlier than intended.

Director Steven Soderbergh ends his short-lived retirement from filmmaking with a hillbilly variation on his OCEAN’S trilogy. Rebecca Blunt, a first-time screenwriter suspected of being a Soderbergh or his wife’s pseudonym, accounts for all of the questions that might arise in LOGAN LUCKY’s unlikely and intricately plotted robbery. The wide frame and Soderbergh’s open compositions provide room to appreciate how big of an undertaking the heist is and the teamwork necessary to pull it off. The implementation of Jimmy’s plan delivers pleasure because of its finely tooled nature. Sure, this brazen theft is improbable, but the degree to which it has been thought out highlights the structural beauty.

While LOGAN LUCKY hits all the right spots as a heist movie, it’s equally adept as a comedy. The relaxed scenes unwind with amusement at the situations that develop in unexpected ways. A staged prison riot results in a funny negotiation between the convicts and the exasperated warden played by Dwight Yoakam. Joe Bang’s tricks of the trade provoke skepticism until he explains the chemistry and gets the desired result. Mellie’s verbal undermining of the husband of Jimmy’s ex-wife highlights the difference between knowledge and position as the beautician is better acquainted with cars than the auto dealer. The film delights in tweaking expectations.

It seems like accusations of mockery surface any time a film comedically portrays people from the heartland, but LOGAN LUCKY manifests a great deal of warmth for its characters. They may do ridiculous things or have silly ideas, but the film laughs at the frailties in the human condition, not because it’s gawking at self-proclaimed rednecks. The opening scene with Jimmy and his daughter conveys the great affection between the two as he works on his truck and she hands him the requested tools. This relationship informs everything that transpires in the film and is indicative of the generosity the main characters show one another. The emotional peak is reached at a children’s beauty pageant with the singing of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” a scene that could have been mawkish but instead is quite affecting in getting to the heart of what motivates proud, put-upon people like Jimmy and his family. The hijinks and humor conceal the economic subtext, a familiar subject in Soderbergh’s films, but LOGAN LUCKY makes sure to remind that these ornery people are trying to exploit an opportunity just like those who profit off of them.

Grade: A-

Creep

CREEP (Patrick Brice, 2014)

In CREEP Aaron (Patrick Brice) accepts a videography job in the mountains not knowing much about what he’ll be recording other than it will pay well for one day’s work. Initially the remoteness of the location unnerves him somewhat, especially because his client Josef (Mark Duplass) startles him by banging on the window of Aaron’s car by way of an introduction. Aaron’s imagination also wanders a bit when spotting an axe in front of the house but dismisses it once he starts doing what he’s been hired to do.

That’s not to say everything is normal. Josef tells him that he wants Aaron to record him all day because he has a brain tumor, likely has just a couple months left, and wishes to document who he is for the unborn son his wife is carrying. For the first thing they record Josef disrobes and pretends to give his baby a bath. The interpersonal tension at the beginning doesn’t entirely go away, but by the time they finish it seems to have been a worthwhile experience for Aaron. He can’t find his keys when he’s ready to leave, though. The longer he’s in Josef’s home, the more concerned he becomes for his safety.

CREEP is shot with the first-person perspective, which has the effect of making the viewer present in the goings-on, if not exactly an active participant. The distance between the audience and the characters is shortened so that it feels like being in the room with them even if as an unacknowledged observer. The form charges the interactions so that they are direct and intense and not mediated through the camera. The fewer number of cuts emphasize being put on the spot in awkward situations. The uneasiness cannot be relieved because you are trapped in the moment as the recording rolls.

Duplass, who co-wrote the story with Brice, excels at straddling the line of being friendly and unsettling with his overly familiar manner. Josef is a little weird, particularly where he lacks boundaries, but it’s hard to discern if such quirks are harmless breaches of social etiquette or indicative of a deeper pathology. Duplass molds Josef into the kind of person who could be fun to be around in one instance and put you on guard in another. He doesn’t necessarily come across as sinister, yet Duplass doesn’t hide the calculation in how Josef tests Aaron’s limits under the guise of honesty. Duplass’ performance highlights how someone can give you the creeps even though there may not be tangible evidence of anything dangerous about him.

CREEP reveals itself to be about how propriety can be used against the person who strains to be polite. Because Aaron is genuinely a nice guy, he gives Josef the benefit of the doubt. He also gives him leeway because it’s how we’re taught to be from a young age. Even if Josef comes across as kind of strange, many people feel the reflex not to act overly judgmental when face to face with such a person. Doing so would be rude and only serve to amplify the awkwardness. CREEP considers how that civility could be a fatal flaw when the other party refuses to abide by the contract. On the surface not much in CREEP is objectively scary, but the context of what is said and done often makes it terrifying.

Grade: B

A Ghost Story

A GHOST STORY (David Lowery, 2017)

In the brief time the couple credited as C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara) in A GHOST STORY are together, we see how close they can be and the disagreement they have over whether or not to stay in their current home. He feels attached to the place where they share their lives; to her the house holds no special importance.

The difference of opinions about the space continues when they are parted. C is killed in an automobile accident. When he becomes conscious of being on a new plane of existence, he declines to move on. Instead, donning the white sheet that covered him in the morgue, C is drawn back to the house, where he watches M but is invisible to her. What he recalls about his time before being a ghost is unclear, but something keeps him there. M grieves but in time moves on from him and the house. C remains even as the occupants change, rooted to a location where he feels an unexplained loss and unresolved anger.

C can make things go bump in the night and lash out in the ways other stories have conditioned us to think of ghosts, but writer-director David Lowery has other interests than eliciting jumps from an apparition that goes, “Boo!” For one, A GHOST STORY portrays the experience of grief for the deceased. The metaphysics at play are vague, but C appears to have a choice to advance to a different level or stay on this earthly one. The decision to remain haunts him and others like him. These ghosts are like dogs left at home without any way of knowing when or if their owners will return. They are waiting for that happy moment when they are reunited with someone, except they experience time much differently and have little to no memory of why they feel holes at their cores. The ghost’s grief is not specific but a general emptiness with no obvious way of filling it.

Lowery also studies the grief for a place. Time transforms everywhere, so even if a spot has little turnover in residents or a lot through the years, the space is not what it once was. Just as the physical qualities change, the relationship with the location adapts. Mental associations are as much a part of the structure as the beams. C’s link in life and afterlife to the house are all of the emotional ties and memories that it contains, yet what he struggles to realize is that those don’t vanish even with the absence of the four walls around him. In contrast to the film’s minimal dialogue, Lowery spells this out effectively, although somewhat heavy-handedly, with a monologue delivered by a prognosticator played by Will Oldham.

A GHOST STORY unfolds in the style of European and Asian slow cinema so it can better convey the different experience of time and put our years into perspective regarding the universe’s age. Little tends to happen, but when C flits through time in a less comprehensive version of THE TREE OF LIFE’s birth of the universe section, Lowery powerfully evokes the impermanence of what we tend to assume as eternal.

Rather than generating restlessness, the stillness and relative silence in A GHOST STORY create room for meditation and appreciating the visual detail. C’s ghost sheet is gorgeously wrinkled with impenetrably dark eyeholes, more like a haute couture version of a death shroud than a homemade costume from the Charlie Brown Halloween special. The score by Daniel Hart and key song “I Get Overwhelmed” by his band Dark Rooms express the wistfulness in time’s redefining of things throughout life. A GHOST STORY aches for what no longer is but reminds that truly the most valuable things transcend.

Grade: A-

Atomic Blonde

ATOMIC BLONDE (David Leitch, 2017)

Set in 1989 prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, ATOMIC BLONDE takes MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) to the divided German city in search of Satchel, a spy who is double crossing the West to work with the Soviet Union. His latest collaboration with a KGB officer resulted in a British agent’s death and the theft of a sensitive list that names all of the spies secretly working in the USSR. Lorraine is tasked with killing Satchel, retrieving the list, and helping with the defection of Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), a Stasi officer who initially stole the list to give to the West and who has it memorized.

Lorraine’s cover is blown as soon as she lands in Berlin. Although she’s more than capable of taking care of herself, she gains information and assistance from David Percival (James McAvoy), a fellow MI6 agent who has been working undercover there for a long time. Meanwhile, French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella) is keeping close tabs on Lorraine.

ATOMIC BLONDE shares a lot of similarities with JOHN WICK, which comes as no surprise as director David Leitch was an uncredited co-director for the Keanu Reeves revenge film. Both feature staggeringly talented and stylishly dressed killers cutting swaths through underworlds in dark cities edged with neon. Lorraine works for the government while John is an assassin for hire, but otherwise they’re characters cut from the same cloth. Leitch exerts great effort to make the action and fight scenes legible. The violence is choreographed and edited to appreciate the viciousness of it, but the action isn’t just a demonstration of sheer power. Equal importance is placed on admiring the elegance in how the hero moves and how she looks in her fashionable clothes.

The action centerpiece comes late in ATOMIC BLONDE with a long sequence constructed to seem as though it is one unbroken take. Lorraine engages in hand-to-hand combat with some bad guys and then hops into a car for a perilous drive through the city. Even if one can tell where shots are stitched together, this stunning section cranks up the excitement so that there is more investment in marveling at what’s happening than how they pulled it off.

As in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, Theron proves herself to be a dynamic action star. Her long lines lend aesthetic grace to the action, and her physicality drives home the force. Leitch employs dark, brooding, modern rock hits to complement the emotional coolness that Theron channels from French film noir. Lorraine is not a great character, but ATOMIC BLONDE hands Theron a role that capitalizes on that je ne sais quoi that differentiates movie stars from other actors.

ATOMIC BLONDE’s plot is needlessly complicated, especially as the espionage intrigue delivers little in the way of surprises. Leitch devotes more energy to developing the atmosphere. While ATOMIC BLONDE coasts on touring through the chic and dingy corners of a city that will soon be upended, soaking up the grimy pleasures of this setting with a natty heroine as a guide satisfies.

Grade: B-

Baby Driver

BABY DRIVER (Edgar Wright, 2017)

With the name Baby (Ansel Elgort), his lanky appearance, and omnipresent earbuds from one of his many loaded iPods, the protagonist of BABY DRIVER seems more like an aspiring indie rock star than the preferred wheelman for an Atlanta kingpin. He obsessively listens to music to tune out tinnitus from a childhood car accident that claimed his mother and father, but it also helps him focus when he’s driving fast and executing dangerous maneuvers. When he was younger Baby stole a car from the wrong man, so for years he’s been using his prodigious skills as a driver during heists to repay what he owes to Doc (Kevin Spacey).

After he makes things square for his past mistake, Doc isn’t inclined to let his best getaway man walk away and leave him hanging even though Baby wants out. It’s abundantly clear, though, that the wellbeing of Debora (Lily James), a diner waitress he’s started seeing, and his deaf surrogate father Joseph (CJ Jones) will be leveraged to pull Baby back for at least one more job. Ordinarily Doc doesn’t employ the same criminals twice, but he recalls bloodthirsty Bats (Jamie Foxx) and druggie lovebirds Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Darling (Eiza González) for a scheme to steal blank money orders from a post office. Baby really has no choice but to participate, although he hopes to be able to slip away with his dreamgirl before he’s pressed into action.

Writer-director Edgar Wright conceives BABY DRIVER as an action film set to a feature-length playlist. Strictly speaking, it’s not a musical, yet the wall-to-wall soundtrack and syncing of movement and sound with the rock and soul tracks give it the feel of one. The opening credits sequence with Baby grooving down the street to Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” as he goes to pick up coffee for the crew is more reminiscent of LA LA LAND than a Michael Mann crime picture. Throughout the matching of music and action prompts a synergistic reaction for such a bracing and joyful demonstration of filmmaking craft.

The delightful choreography extends beyond the actors’ motions and gestures. The car chases are planned, shot, and edited to deliver the thrills of fast machines being handled in incredible ways. Contemporary action cinema’s editing styles tends to favor sensation over legibility. CGI has reduced the reliance on practical effects, some for greater capability and some surely for safety’s sake. Both approaches have led to forgetting or devaluing the simple pleasures of a good car chase. Wright starts BABY DRIVER with a doozy that includes a clever reshuffling of similar cars to throw the authorities off the trail of the fleeing criminals. He doesn’t top this car chase, but the others in the film are plenty exciting as they’re stoked by pulse-pounding songs.

The screenplay, the first credited solely to him since his low-budget debut A FISTFUL OF FINGERS, is loaded with witty dialogue versed in pop culture. An argument over the purchase of the wrong Halloween mask exemplifies the cleverness and speed in Wright’s writing. Spacey is particularly suited for the rat-a-tat-tat rhythm of the verbal humor and gets probably the biggest laugh when expressing his weariness of Baby quoting one film. BABY DRIVER doesn’t have the depth of THE WORLD’S END, Wright’s best film, but like all of his movies it bubbles with a sense of fun. The energy and assuredness in his direction signals to strap in and enjoy the ride.

Grade: A-

Spider-Man: Homecoming

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (Jon Watts, 2017)

Although Peter Parker (Tom Holland) tries to balance life as a high school student and a superhero in SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING, naturally he’s drawn more to fighting crime and being a beloved part of the community. To his frustration, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) cautions him about getting too involved in such extracurricular activities, although he does provide him with an improved suit. After a night patrolling the neighborhood, Peter’s best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) learns that he is Spider-Man, a fact that delights him to no end.

Peter stumbles upon the shady dealings of Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a former salvager now using and dealing alien technology to enrich himself and his associates. While Tony doesn’t want Peter to pursue the matter, he can’t help but investigate, which puts him and and his classmates at risk.

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING brings more of the traditional comic book sensibility back to the superhero universe. Director Jon Watts, one of six credited screenwriters, constructs the film like a teen movie with some regular people possessing extraordinary powers than something rooted in the realm of fantasy. Doing so grounds SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING and gives it a touch of wonder at the incredible feats the heroes and villains perform. Watts also suffuses this SPIDER-MAN with a breezier tone that gooses the humor, particularly in the scenes with Peter’s high school peers, and makes the protagonist and his struggles more down to earth.

Holland exudes a lot of charm in his first time playing the ordinary teenager turned webslinger. He imparts Peter with infectious enthusiasm, which he tempers with the insecurity and desire to push limits that are a hallmark of adolescence. He is confident scrambling up the Washington Monument but less sure of himself when it comes to asking his academic decathlon teammate Liz (Laura Harrier) to the dance. Holland lends a dancer’s grace to the physicality with which he plays Peter and Spider-Man, which reinforces the joy that buzzes through the film.

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING surrounds Peter with a splendid supporting cast. Batalon is funny and endearing as the pal who is excited for Peter and at the prospect that he might be able to be his assistant, the proverbial guy in the room in action movies. As wisecracking classmate Michelle, Zendaya often gets some of the biggest laughs from the withering way she expresses herself. Harrier adds depth to the potentially thankless love interest role as she evokes the complexities in the romance Liz and Peter hesitantly begin.

Keaton fleshes out the antagonist so that his perspective is understandable even if it isn’t justifiable. Adrian’s bruised sense of fairness and need to provide for his family guides him down a darker path that gradually eases him down the moral slippery slope. Keaton lets the character cook in his righteous outrage, like a frog not realizing it’s being boiled as the temperature in the pot slowly increases. For Adrian the outcome is similar as his corruption he gives in to slowly grows.

It doesn’t seem like there are a zillion different things happening in SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING or that it absolutely has to fit within a larger framework of the Marvel films. The less convoluted story allows the film to feel fleeter and dig into the character elements. After a string of unsatisfactory SPIDER-MAN movies, it’s a pleasure to encounter one notable for its zippy sense of fun, humor, and thrills.

Grade: B+

War for the Planet of the Apes

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (Matt Reeves, 2017)

At one point as a kid I wondered what it would be like in movies or after-school cartoons if the bad guys won for a change. After all, no matter how things appeared to be going in these shows and films, everything predictably worked out in the end. I suspect that this fleeting thought from my childhood was common among those of the same age who were becoming bored with the formula. Now that my generation has a lot of sway in what gets made, it seems that we’re getting the chance to discover what it feels like when the course reverses and good doesn’t triumph or its victories in mass entertainment are pyrrhic. Think of all the remakes and franchise reboots in the last decade or so whose differentiating quality is that they are now dark, gritty, or edgy. The new normal is an overwhelming sense of gloom and doom, in part because it is considered more artistically serious. While any framework will yield worthwhile and lousy results, this worldview in event films has become exhausting.

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES picks up two years into the combat between humans and the apes. Having toppled Koba in the previous film, Caesar (Andy Serkis) leads his kind, making him the top priority for The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) to find and eliminate. Caesar wishes for the fighting to stop, so when the apes capture some of the enemy, he sends them back as a gesture meant to broker a detente. Instead the intel of where Caesar is invites a slaughter of many he’s been trying to protect.

Caesar sends most of the survivors toward a new home while he intends to exact revenge on the Colonel. Rocket (Terry Notary), Winter (Aleks Paunovic), and Spear (Alessandro Juliani) refuse to let him go alone. On their search they take pity on and add to their group a mute girl given the name Nova (Amiah Miller). They also come across former zoo animal Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), who knows where the Colonel and his men are stationed and agrees to show them.

Beginning with 2011’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the rebooted series has always had dark clouds looming over it because the original films provide the roadmap for where the new ones will arrive. They’ve become progressively darker and now reach the exceedingly grim WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. What gets depicted is restrained enough to stay within the confines of a box office-maximizing PG-13 rating, but what happens is pretty horrific regardless of which side comes out on top. Tragedy builds upon tragedy to the point that by the time this aggressively feel-bad film concludes I left the theater hoping the sun hadn’t been extinguished in the interim. WONDER WOMAN features its share of darkness, but at the core it prizes earnestness, decency, and love over fear, nihilism and hatred. It’s unfair to WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, but I’m seeking more of what WONDER WOMAN is promoting at this point in time.

Perhaps I was just in the wrong mood when I saw WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. It’s a marvelous technical achievement that the number and variety of simians are so convincing that it’s taken for granted that they are real. Although Zahn’s Bad Ape probably belongs in a more lighthearted film, the provides comic relief and a much-needed glimmer of fun. Director and co-writer Matt Reeves lingers on the breathtaking scope of the landscapes being traversed and occupied. The action scenes are brutally effective. The film’s allegory about humanity’s penchant for mutually assured destruction hits hard in the context of the daily news. But WAR OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is such an oppressive film to watch. Plus, there’s the sneaking suspicion that its purpose is just to advance the series to where we knew it was eventually headed.

Grade: C+

The Discovery

THE DISCOVERY (Charlie McDowell, 2017)

Thomas Harbor (Robert Redford) finds overwhelming proof that the afterlife exists in THE DISCOVERY, although what that other plane of existence is like remains unknown. Two years after he announces the discovery, four million people have committed suicide, often with the expectation of getting a fresh start. Thomas’s son Will (Jason Segel) remains more skeptical regarding what his father’s findings mean and detests the widespread social response to them. He protests that the evidence is not definitive, nor does it promise a better life. Upon hearing that his father has built a new machine, Will returns to their island home, now a fortress-like building where Thomas, his other son Toby (Jesse Plemons), and a group of people whose suicide attempts failed continue the secretive work to learn what exists beyond the veil.

On the ferry there Will encounters Isla (Rooney Mara), the only other passenger making the trip to the island in the off-season. Both dodge explaining why they are going to such a place and part ways without expecting to see one another again for reasons that become clear soon enough. Will does not want his father to reflect on him, and Isla is hiding her intention to kill herself. Later Will spots Isla’s attempt to drown in the ocean and saves her. He also smooths the way for her to receive a spot among the selected in his father’s home. It’s a momentous time there as Thomas now believes he can record what is seen in the afterlife. When the experiment appears to fail, only Will knows that a recording is made, although what he sees is difficult to translate.

Director and co-writer Charlie McDowell imparted a TWILIGHT ZONE-like quality to his debut feature THE ONE I LOVE, and he does it again with THE DISCOVERY. Both films take place in worlds very much like ours except in one specific aspect that recontextualizes everything we know. The consequences of the discovery mostly take place off-screen and emerge in anecdotes, but the impact hangs heavy over the proceedings. Thomas is as driven as ever because he bears the weight of all the people who interpreted his pioneering finding in a way he likely didn’t anticipate or desire. The film eludes questions about the religious implications, yet Thomas has constructed something like a cult around him. Whether intentional or not, THE DISCOVERY recalls THE MASTER in shots of the ocean and Thomas’s private, personal interview method for determining who can stay. (Both also have small roles for Plemons.)

THE DISCOVERY is most compelling as it dives deeper into the search for answers. McDowell wisely does not get into the speculative science involved, leaving it to suspension of disbelief to accept the film on its own terms rather than getting bogged down debating the viability. He explains what developments mean more often than allowing the viewer to do the math, which takes some of the fun out of THE DISCOVERY, but he draws out the hunger to comprehend what new information signifies. Humans want to bring order to the unknown, so it is imperative that the film satisfies that craving. McDowell’s most prominent stumble occurs at a climax that seems like it should be revelatory yet, more than anything preceding it, confused me in the Christopher Nolan-like layers upon layers. The romantic element between Will and Isla comes off as more forced than credible even as it becomes more integral.

Although the material is treated seriously, THE DISCOVERY carves out room for some humor. As the more dutiful son, Plemons displays a cavalier attitude about the research and arrangements that highlight what those deeply embedded in something weird accept as normal. Mara lends a sarcastic edge to Isla, particularly when she identifies the strangeness of her and Will selecting and returning a corpse.

Whether one believes in eternal spiritual existence after death or not, THE DISCOVERY asks a provocative question: does the inability to know with complete certainty what comes next invest more meaning in life? The film’s answers could be more rigorously considered but are thoughtful nonetheless.

Grade: B

Okja

OKJA (Bong Joon Ho, 2017)

Under the leadership of CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton), the Mirando Corporation has a grand design to disrupt worldwide meat production in OKJA; however, the discovery and breeding of a so-called superpig that leaves less of a carbon footprint while tasting good is not intended for a rapid product launch. Instead Lucy distributes twenty-six superpigs to farmers around the globe for a competition to name the best one in ten years.

Mija (An Seo Hyun) and her grandfather Heebong (Byun Heebong) are raising their superpig named Okja in the mountains of South Korea. Okja is essentially a floppy-eared hippo with a dog’s personality, so to Mija she is more like a beloved pet than livestock. Although Mija assumes her grandfather has purchased Okja from the company, she despairs upon learning that the Mirando Corporation has taken the superpig to its local headquarters before sending her to the surely dire fate that awaits in New York City.

Determined to get her best friend back, Mija embarks for Seoul, where her attempt to retrieve Okja crosses with a rescue mission led by Jay (Paul Dano) of the Animal Liberation Front. They want to expose Mirando’s practices and need Okja to gain access to their facilities. The public relations fallout surrounding the ALF’s heist and return of Okja lead the corporation to bring Mija to New York for a reunion of the girl and her superpig.

OKJA is akin to a hybrid of David Lowery’s 2016 remake of PETE’S DRAGON and FAST FOOD NATION, mixing the action-adventure of children’s fantasy with political satire. Such a genre medley makes for a striking, albeit inconsistent, fable. Rather than scratching out a screed against multinational conglomerates, writer-director Bong Joon Ho seeks to provide balance to a complicated issue, even if where the film’s sympathies reside are never in doubt. The activists practice laughable extremes to prove their commitment to ideals and struggle to pass their own purity tests. Although the corporation is undeniably driven by a profit motive, Lucy is well-meaning in bringing this product to the market. The inherent deception in her marketing plan is necessary because consumers tend to prefer not to know how their food gets to them.

OKJA doesn’t shy away from depicting the realities of factory farming and processing, but Bong isn’t arguing in favor of vegetarianism or veganism. The film’s aim seems to be less specific. Rather, it seeks to raise consciousness of the system and how consumer choices and attitudes are interconnected with corporate decisions. Bong is addressing big, complex questions about international demand and the supply chain. The points he makes can get muddled, which is the challenge of infusing so much thematic ambition into a simple story.

There’s a lot to like about OKJA even as Bong tries to do more than he can effectively manage. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Johnny Wilcox, a Jack Hanna-like TV host who is the face of the superpig competition, isn’t established sufficiently for the dark turns the character takes to have dramatic impact. Gyllenhaal’s broad performance comes off as a miscalculated attempt to match Swinton’s quirkiness. Bong mostly succeeds at shifting tones from sweet to satiric and humorous to horrifying, but easing into the film’s end, including a post-credits scene, indicates that he wasn’t certain how to wrap OKJA beyond one obvious matter.

Lest OKJA sound like an economics lesson, the adventure Mija finds herself caught up in might be better thought of as a globalism-questioning WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, although be advised this is decidedly not a film for little kids. Early scenes of Mija and Okja cavorting in the countryside have the charm of the children playing with E.T. An impresses with the determination and intelligence she conveys in Mija even as others try to exploit her for their interests. Bong shows off his flair for staging action with Mija’s thrilling chase after Okja through downtown Seoul. Although OKJA is ambivalent at best about whether changing the world is scalable, it rejoices in the fights and victories achieved on a micro level. That may not be altogether heartening, but the small wins are what fuel the pursuit of larger ones.

Grade: B